Why do we love serial killers?

Indledning
Nowadays, watching the news for a new case of someone labelled ‘insane’ or ‘psychopath’ is typical.

It almost disappoints us if we do not here anymore crazy news nowadays. Words such as ‘psychopath’ ‘crazy’ etc. Is something that we - sadly - have come to recognize in our everyday life, we almost strive for the next thrilling story on the headlines of several newspapers around the world. But why do we ‘love’ things such as serial killers? Why do we strive for the ‘action’?

Optimer dit sprog - Klik her og bliv verdensmester i at skrive opgaver

Uddrag
Thus, it makes sense that people would, as Dr. Bonn says, feel compelled to understand them. The adage, “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t,” is a reasonable truth. The less foreign these killers become, the less scary they seem. Though the shows stir up fear in the viewers, they simultaneously quell it.”

Because of the points mentioned earlier, Bonn thinks that it does not matter for the citizens anymore if they watch a real serial killer case or a fictional show.

And he states that the fictional and non-fictional worlds bleed into each other, for example, Buffalo Bill, who collects victims’ skin in Silence of the Lambs, was based in part on real-life killer Ed Gein, who kept a collection of women’s body parts, or Jeffery Dahmer the cannibalistic serial killer who was apprehended in 1991, was compared endlessly to Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lector.

Even the media is trying to paint the killers as these storybook villains, and when Bonn looked into some articles on New York times and times magazines he discovered that in 35 percent of the articles, was used one or more words like ‘evil’, or ‘monster’. “The narrative of good and evil is something that we are taught, and we fit things into that.”

Bonn invokes the sociological concept of anomie, a state in which a society’s norms and rules are broken and confused. When a serial killer is at large, people flail about looking for moral guidance, Bonn says.